28 September 2012 6:58 PM

Channel Four plumbed new depths this week. If hadn’t laughed so
much at Jon Snow’s new persona as poster boy and apologist for illegal drugs,
eclipsing the Nutty Prof, I would have cried.

Poor old David Nutt was left to slouch on too narrow a bench at the
back of the set, while our new rebel without a cause took centre stage. The
smirking prof was allowed forward, but only at Jon’s behest, to prod and
massage his two outsize translucent brain models, nearly as rotund as he.

Up until now this distinctly unhealthy looking professor of psycho
pharmacology had no competition for his star billing on the legalising drugs
circuit. Former MP, Dr Evan Harris, may have tried but his doctor death looks
and charisma bypass spelt failure.

Jon Snow proved an altogether different kettle of fish. Suffering
from some form of adolescent regression or maybe affected by all that ‘E’ being
dispensed to the show’s celebrity human guinea pigs, he outshone the prof and
his scarily saturnine co-host to boot.

It wasn’t so much the Nutt show as the Snow show.

For the over excited John Snow simply could not contain his
enthusiasm for the magic of MDMA. This is amazing, he ejaculated; it is quite
remarkable, he enthused, as he peered at the presence or absence of a green
blob on the E loving (every day did he say he took it?) Keith Allen’s brain
scan.

Cheery chappy though he seemed to be, Allen, as a guinea pig and
advocate for this TV Trial, was a strange choice. His erratic comments
suggested a man who’d lost the plot as well as any respect for the law, years
ago. But even this did not halt the impressionable Mr Snow in his tracks.

It didn’t seem to matter whether it was Allen’s brain or an abused
women emoting under the would be therapeutic influence of illicit MDMA; it was
all equally ‘ground breaking’ and ‘incredible’ for the not now so young
Jon.

But ground breaking and incredible it was not. Channel Four’s
‘findings’ had no more significance than an anecdote has for science.

Frank disbelief sent me delving into to my ecstasy research files
after the first programme. I did not need to wait for Professor Iversen to tell
me (in the Telegraph today) that there are already 68 scientific (published and
peer reviewed, unlike Nutt’s C4 TV trial charade) studies of ecstasy brain
imaging techniques.

So how could Channel Four so casually ignore and dismiss the last
fifteen years of research into the impact of this stimulant and hallucinogenic
drug? Would they rectify this
fundamental omission in the second show?

40 minutes in and it was clear they hadn’t and that they wouldn’t.
Science got short shrift. Snow
interrupted and slapped down the only two contrary expert opinions given any
air time at all. He had clearly already
come to his conclusion.

He was not helped by the producer’s decision,
presumably with Nutt’s blessing, to wring the maximum publicity from this telly show
time and to marginalise the critics.

So though the show invited some on (in the name of balance) the viewer
never got to see let alone hear them.
Child development expert, Professor Derek Moore, Julia Manning, chief
exec of the 2020 Health think tank and David Raynes, drugs prevention
campaigner and expert on drug trafficking including precursor chemicals, did
not even get a look in.

By any standard this was the cheapest of programming ploys. You do not
waste experts’ time with the promise of participation that you never had any
intention of honouring. The bias was
transparent to anyone in the know. So too, by the end was the programme’s true
purpose – to provide a platform to knock the so called war on drugs.

The inconvenient truth about ecstasy - facts from 15 years of research
into its impact – proved too inconvenient for this TV travesty of science. They
were minimised, sidestepped or dismissed.

Yet it includes the following impacts:

significant short term cognitive impairment

long term impairment in former but now abstinent users

loss of sexual interest and pleasure

rebound depression and lethargy in 80% of users

long term neuro-psychopharmocological damage

fatal serotonin (arousal) reactions

Nor was the
interesting fact that the base ingredient of the MDMA chemical compound,
safrole, causes liver damage mentioned; or that this was why it was banned by
the FDA as early as 1960 (up till when it was used in products such as root
beer).

But Channel Four’s
irresponsibility went further. Perhaps
no one bothered to check, in their enthusiasm for their project, the even more
devastating risks of this drug’s use.

Were the celeb guinea
pigs told for example that ecstasy can cause human birth defects (as well
as defects at later developmental stages).

Ecstasy, researchers believe, can disturb the development of the
embryo or foetus; it can halt pregnancy or produce a congenital malformation. This
is what British
researchers have reported.

Their startling and
frightening findings were that of 136 pregnancies they tracked during which the
mothers took Ecstasy, only 78 babies were born alive and of these, 15.4% had
congenital abnormalities (birth defects
including clubfoot, skull defects, toe malformations and two cases of
congenital heart defects. By comparison, the malformation rate for pregnant
women in the general population is about 3%.[i][i]

The study’s authors
make it clear that the sample was not large enough to prove a causal link
between Ecstasy and birth defects but that they are enough to indicate that
Ecstasy should be avoided by pregnant women.

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